A pictorial, poetic portrayal of an “other” created by my son Emilio, a seventh-grader at the time, age 12.

The work was created as a school assignment in which students were asked to portray a peer without them knowing. Students had to collect data about their subject anonymously and indirectly, and then create a scrapbook presentation to be shown in class. Emilio's production went far beyond the goals of the assignment and of his teachers’ expectations. It is a genuine work of art in both images and words and reflects a depth of perception and reflexiveness that still continues to amaze me. Emilio’s scrapbook gained widespread appreciation and I could not pass the opportunity to turn it into a film and share it with others.

The scrapbook is assembled as a folding strip containing nine different images with their accompanying text that can be seen and read sequentially as the story unfolds. Below are some of the images and the complete text.